How does Twendly differ from a Google or Twitter Search?
We are really excited about the traffic we are getting on Twendly - it's great to see people getting value from it.
Of course, in a world that is largely used to searching for documents, it can take a slight "twist" of thinking to easily understand the difference between a document Vs. a people search. We'd like to illustrate this with some examples.
In Twendly, put simply, you're searching for the things people are talking about. If you search for your name, you're searching for the person who talks about you the most, not necessarily yourself (unless of course you talk about yourself a lot!).
These three screen shots help to summarise this difference and give a good illustration on how it works by comparing a Google Search, a Twitter Search and a Twendly Search using exactly the same search terms "Lotus Connections".
In the following Google Search you can see that a search for Lotus Connections returns documents and sites- it's shown you the most relevant locations to go and research further yourself.
In Twitter search, you see the people who are mentioning Lotus Connections "right now". This also has its place - you can join in the current conversation. The problem is that although these are people, it doesn't give a sense of who the relevant ones are - perhaps the leading people are silent just at the moment.
Finally there is a search in Twendly. It returns people, with an easy gauge on both how much and how frequently they talk about Lotus Connections. Having had some experience, I can vouch for 7 of these being excellent people to talk to about Lotus Connections and the rest as good information sources.
To keep the test fair, we used the same search terms for each tool, however there are lots of ways in each search engine to refine the search results. If you want to refine the result in Twendly to exclude people (or Twitter bots in this case) who tweet lots of links, a handy tip is to include -http at the end of your search e.g. http://twendly.com/?q=lotus+connections+-http This simply says don't include any thing mentioning HTTP. Depending on the search topic and the type of people you are looking for, you'll find the relevancy often improves further if you do this.
